Politics and Culture of Modern Sports

This study examines the role of modern sports in constructing national identities and domestic and foreign policy. It focuses on the development of national sporting cultures in Great Britain and the United States, how the rest of Europe and the world adopted or rejected their games, and the impact of sports on politics.

Sheldon Anderson is professor of history at Miami University (Ohio), specializing in Cold War history, European diplomatic history, and sports history. He is the author of A Dollar to Poland Is a Dollar to Russia (1993), A Cold War in the Soviet Bloc (2000), Condemned to Repeat It (2008), and The Politics and Culture of Modern Sports (2015).

Chapter 1: British Sports and National Identity in Nineteenth Century Europe Chapter 2: Sports and Construction of American National Identity, and the Export of Baseball Abroad Chapter 3: Sports in the Service of Fascism and Communism in the Interwar Period. Chapter 4: Sports and the Cold War Chapter 5: Communist Sport Rivalries and the Role of Sport in the German Question Chapter 6: Sports and the Reconstruction of Postwar Western Europe and Japan Chapter 7: Sports, Decolonization, and Nation Building Chapter 8: Globalization and Competing Sporting Identities Chapter 9: The Politics and Economics of Hosting International Sporting Events